We must establish an adequate twentieth century theory of household economics and then we must put this within the reach of every girl in our public schools.
My desk is covered always with pamphlets entitled The Profession of Home-making, Food Values, Freehand Cooking on Scientific Principles, and so on, but does this knowledge reach the people? Does it reach the 388,000 school girls? Recently I heard an hour’s talk by a member of the Board of Health on how we ought to know good milk from bad, how careful we should be about canned vegetables, and the horrors of buying tainted meat: but when I asked how the common people could know these facts I could get no satisfaction other than that the way to know whether the milk was good or not was to examine the barns where the cows were milked or have the milk tested; but the people I know are ignorant as to how to wash milk bottles, or why it is wrong to leave the milk uncovered, or why the nipple from the milk bottle can’t be played with, fall on the floor and then be used. This representative from the Board of Health told startling facts about candies and ice cream, sold on push carts, but the audience at this lecture were land owners along the Hudson River, and I doubt if one of them had ever seen an East Side push cart, and I know that not one was ever tempted to buy. Why can’t these facts reach the thousands of children who do buy dyed ice cream and varnished candy, and whose fathers sell these very things?
A COOKING LESSON
We not only have to establish an up-to-date, scientific way to live, but we cannot do this without the help of the tenement house woman. We contribute the ideals, the theories and the science; she must contribute experience. We are up in the air with our castles, she is down in the thick of the fight where the smallness of the tenement room presses upon her, where every day she faces the high price of food and an insufficient income, where a gentle love for her children is constantly at war with a nervous irritability, the product of disorder, noise and confusion.
Do you think this woman does not want a real home? Look at the energy and thought she puts into furnishing her house, the scrimping that preceded the buying of the ugly red carpet and the plush chairs. There were hours of work given to hemming and hanging the ruffles over every door, around every shelf and even around the bath tub. Look at the tarletan festooned around the chandelier and over the pictures; see the dozens of calendars collected and pinned on the wall. Isn’t this a reaching out with all the power that is in a woman to express to her family and her neighbors what, in her ignorance, she believes to be a home? We need the energy and the courage and the experience of these tenement housekeepers, but we must add education; and do we?
Take the daily life of any one of our thousands of little school girls and see how much chance she has to know the science of home-making or even to acquire respect for housework. She is born with the controlling desire to copy. She sees high-heeled shoes on another’s foot; she longs for and saves until she gets shoes like them. Her tight skirt, her big hat, her very walk, are seen first and admired somewhere else, and so the home, whether it is perfect or imperfect, and the school, and the teacher, and what the teacher stands for, make the same vivid pictures in her mind; and some day she is going to grow up and copy as nearly as she can.
This little girl wakes in the morning in one of our crowded tenement houses, wakes to the vivid blue walls, to rooms filled with feather beds which have been thrown all over the floor the night before for the family and the possible boarders to occupy. The dusty carpets, stuffed furniture, long lace curtains and draped mantle meet her eye, and in this home of unrest there is always the crying baby, the naturally cross father and the demand (so well known to every little girl) to hurry up and go to the store and buy breakfast. Poor little tenement girl, she does not even know that in well-managed homes breakfast is bought the day before. She may learn to respect the energy in her home, but she will never forget the disorder, the picture of congestion and confusion and of overwrought, tired nerves that has been stamped forever upon her mind. And no right idea of home is given her to correct this wrong impression.
Everyone knows the way work is done in our tenement homes; how the beds are so large that it is impossible to move them out in the small rooms and make them properly, and how the bed clothes are pushed across, often with a broom handle kept for the purpose; how often the small income makes it necessary to rent out the beds in the day time to night workers, so they are always occupied and never aired. And every one knows how all these things make a girl lose respect for her home, then for her family and, finally, for herself; and how the street seems a peaceful place in comparison.
Ideals of right home-making should in the school correct the home mistakes, but as it is now, not until she reaches the seventh grade does this little tenement girl get her first idea that making a home is a part of education. After she leaves home in the morning she gets only a picture of a schoolroom with forty or fifty desks; of a teacher who in no way is associated in her mind with any house, who, as I heard Mrs. Kelley say not long ago, often brings her lunch in a music roll so that no one will suspect that it is food.